There are a few things in life that one can count on: death, taxes, and people wanting to rewrite your play. And, for our purposes today, the famous dictum from the noted British historian Lord Acton (1834-1902):
"Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. ... Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
It doesn't seem to matter whether those power-wielders are liberals or conservatives, Democrats, Republicans or Independents, civilian or military, decent or warped, whatever. There are exceptions, of course, but the tendency certainly is there for power to corrupt, and the reality that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
There seems to be something inherent in the holding of power that goes to peoples' heads. The resulting misrule seems especially egregious for those leaders who were installed in power via the electoral process. Somehow, against all expectations, we assume -- we want to assume -- that elected leaders will be more "pure," less likely to abuse the power at their command, will be less prone to corruption, will be more accessible to ordinary citizens.
And then our hopes are dashed when the old crew is defeated and the new bunch turn out almost or just as bad, or sometimes even worse. (The only saving grace is that democratic elections, provided they are honest, do make it somewhat easier to remove bad officials -- at least in theory.)
Again, we're not surprised when a dictator behaves atrociously -- Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Amin, Mugabe, Saddam Hussein, et al.; indeed, we'd be surprised if they conducted themselves in any other way. Dictators dictate and go wild with the power they have at their command. Eventually, either their own brutalized populations revolt and overthrow them, or their neighbors or the world community finally decide they've had enough and engineer their downfall. (It usually takes years for this revulsion to build to action; in the meantime, during their reigns of terror, millions have died, economies and institutions are in tatters, and countries' souls have been strangled.)
So where am I going with this? In case you haven't sussed it out, I'll be talking here about CheneyBush, the Democratic Party, and Pervez Musharraf. Lord Acton would have a field day with these guys as negative role models for how not to lead.
CHENEYBUSH & AUTHORITARIANISM
Cheney, ever since his days in the Ford Administration, has been consumed with the desire to expand the powers of the presidency -- presumably as long as he's in proximity to the Oval Office. Candidate-Bush appointed Cheney to go find him the best Vice Presidential running-mate; after a nationwide search, Cheney reported back that he found the perfect V.P. for Bush: himself. The rest is (bad) history.
Bush has been quoted at least three times expressing, supposedly in jocular fashion, that dictatorships are much preferable to clunky, messy democracy -- "as long as I get to be the dictator." Ha, ha.
As they've clearly demonstrated, neither Cheney nor Bush has any affinity for the give and take of democracy. Certainly they've evidenced very little patience for the way the country's Founding Fathers, in their genius, doled out pieces of power to the three branches of government so that no one person or faction easily could abuse their limited authority. If the three branches couldn't come to compromise agreements, there would be governmental deadlock for awhile and then the people would have a chance to rectify and alter the situation with their pressure or with their votes in the next election.
That separation-of-power arrangement worked reasonably well for more than 200 years, but Cheney and Rove and Bush much preferred a more authoritarian approach. They put democracy on hold and took matters into their own hands in order to push their domestic and foreign agendas. The Founding Fathers, and today's citizens, never imagined the scenario of "men with the quality of gangsters" in the Executive Branch amassing all control in their hands, and acting ruthlessly to maintain that stranglehhold on power by crushing all opposition.
Short version: They relegated the then-minority opposition party, the Democrats, to non-entity status with the aim of making them irrelevant to government and, with the help of some electoral dirty-tricks and vote-manipulation, creating one-party rule for at least a generation or two. (The result of keeping all power in the hands of the Republicans was that virtually all bribes and lobbying money went to GOP politicians -- which, given the truth of Lord Acton's dictum, resulted in numerous corruption indictments of Republican office-holders a few years later.)
Further, if any bills passed that didn't please CheneyBush 100%, Bush would attach a "signing statement" to the legislation saying he reserved the right to ignore or overturn those parts he didn't agree with. In effect, a permanent veto power outside the traditional way of quashing Congressional legislation. It's estimated that Bush has attached close to 1000 such "signing statements" to laws passed by Congress.
Even more outrageous: CheneyBush got their legal counsels (David Addington/Scooter Libby, Alberto Gonzales) to devise a theory of governance that permitted Bush to violate the Constitution or Congressional laws whenever he claimed he was acting as "commander-in-chief" to protect the "national-security" interests of the American people. In short, under a cockamamie "unitary executive" theory of governance, Bush would be permitted to act as a dictator on all matters foreign and domestic. He warned the courts, which he has packed with his own ideological kinsmen, not to interfere with these prerogatives, and he essentially cut the Legislative Branch out of oversight of his behavior and/or ignored their occasional objections, in effect daring anybody to stop him.
Bernard Weiner, Ph.D. in government & international relations, has taught at universities in California and Washington, worked for two decades as a writer-editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, and currently serves as co-editor of The Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org).
Well written, well said. I concur wholeheartedly with your article. With the gutsy criminal Republicans and the Democrats who either have a Republican gun to their head or perhaps many of our Democrats are really just Republicans in sheeps’ clothing. Perhaps they are a planned deception? Whatever the case, they’re useless. Perhaps we already have, or atleast certainly need, an operating list of the good and bad members of Congress for all to see and read so we all have better voting criteria.
by
Lance L. Landon (4 articles, 1 quicklinks, 6 diaries, 31 comments)
on Thursday, November 15, 2007 at 12:16:38 AM
1 comments
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